At present, servers are widely used in various enterprises. In addition to application programs in international networks and telecommunication services, the scope of development thereof also includes application programs which are more involved the lives of ordinary people, such as finance, economics, internet banks, etc., all of which must rely on the powerful computing capabilities of the server.
Nowadays, there are many types of servers, and more common servers include rackmount servers and tower servers. The rackmount server herein is a tower server to optimize the structure, and the designed purpose thereof is primarily to minimize the space occupied by the server. In general, the width of a rackmount server is 19 inches, and height is in units of U (1U=44.45 mm). Typically, a rackmount server has its own standards of 1U, 2U, 4U, 5U, and so on. In order to enhance the application program of a baseboard of the current server, system vendors usually design the baseboard of the server to be in conformity with all types (such as 1U, 2U, and 4U) of systems.
A motherboard in the rackmount server system includes a variety of embedded chips (for example, controller chips; Cortex-M3 or Cortex-4 chips of power computing chips). These embedded chips require a firmware to coordinate their operation. If the firmware of the above-mentioned chips requires updating after the background server system has been shipped. The update can be performed by a Rack Management Controller (referred to as RMC) which is disposed in the server rack. The rack management controller includes an ARM9 chip and runs on an embedded Linux system. When the firmware of the embedded chips on a certain motherboard of the rackmount server system needs to be updated, the rack management controller reads a firmware file and decomposes the firmware file into a plurality of packets for sending to an update-needed chip. In a conventional update method, when a packet is sent, the rack management controller will wait for the return of the chip, and check whether the packet CRC is correct. The next packet will be sent only if the CRC is correct. Consequently, at present, a firmware update is relatively slow and takes a longer time.
Accordingly, there is an urgent need to provide a new method or device for updating the firmware of the rackmount server system so as to solve the above-mentioned problem.